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How to build an active community
Article By: David Myers
Today’s webmasters are always striving for new ways of bringing activity and new members to their message board. There are lots of articles out there that will tell you lots of different ways of achieving your goal, but I’m going to try and sum up everything you need to know in this one article.
Before you bring your forum to the public, make sure your it looks appealing to the people that your website is targeting. I would recommend you stay away from the default themes, as your forum would end up looking like a lot of other forums out there. You would want a unique theme that goes along with the kind of website your forum’s going to be on. For instance, if your website was all about computers, you might want a tech feel to the design of your forums.
A mistake most webmasters make when starting out there message board is having too many forums. If you have too many, then your message board won’t look active, and you will lose members because nobody wants to post at a dead forum. I recommend you start with around four to eight forums. That way your message board will seem semi-active. As your message board grows and you gets more and more activity, then you can add more forums.
Another thing you should do before you release your message board to the public is you should make sure that you have plenty of threads. That way new members will have places to post.
It’s a hard project getting an active forum, so here are a few suggestions if you want to start with a bang:
• Have a contest where members can win forum privileges, such as a custom member title, etc., or actual items
• Pay a few people to do a certain amount of posts to get your website active
• Post around at forums and notify people that your forums are up
• You can exchange links with another forum in the same field as yours
And here are some ways to keep your members:
• Give out custom member titles like: Top Poster, Most Improved, etc.
• Keep adding new things to your forums. Most forum software has many mods that you can add to your forums.
• Create a section where members can give comments and critique your forum. It’s a great way to feedback from the members of what you need to improve
• Make sure your forums have a set of guidelines that members have to follow. That helps your members not get out of hand
Today’s webmasters are always striving for new ways of bringing activity and new members to their message board. There are lots of articles out there that will tell you lots of different ways of achieving your goal, but I’m going to try and sum up everything you need to know in this one article.
Before you bring your forum to the public, make sure your it looks appealing to the people that your website is targeting. I would recommend you stay away from the default themes, as your forum would end up looking like a lot of other forums out there. You would want a unique theme that goes along with the kind of website your forum’s going to be on. For instance, if your website was all about computers, you might want a tech feel to the design of your forums.
A mistake most webmasters make when starting out there message board is having too many forums. If you have too many, then your message board won’t look active, and you will lose members because nobody wants to post at a dead forum. I recommend you start with around four to eight forums. That way your message board will seem semi-active. As your message board grows and you gets more and more activity, then you can add more forums.
Another thing you should do before you release your message board to the public is you should make sure that you have plenty of threads. That way new members will have places to post.
It’s a hard project getting an active forum, so here are a few suggestions if you want to start with a bang:
• Have a contest where members can win forum privileges, such as a custom member title, etc., or actual items
• Pay a few people to do a certain amount of posts to get your website active
• Post around at forums and notify people that your forums are up
• You can exchange links with another forum in the same field as yours
And here are some ways to keep your members:
• Give out custom member titles like: Top Poster, Most Improved, etc.
• Keep adding new things to your forums. Most forum software has many mods that you can add to your forums.
• Create a section where members can give comments and critique your forum. It’s a great way to feedback from the members of what you need to improve
• Make sure your forums have a set of guidelines that members have to follow. That helps your members not get out of hand
